Amber Heard is pawing through the record bin at Other Music in NoHo, green eyes narrowed in concentration, shuffling through the stack until—aha!—she finds what she is looking for. Willie McTell!" she says, holding up the record. "That's my favorite. If you really want to go into blues," she instructs, you go to the Blinds: Blind Willie McTell. Blind Boy Fuller. Blind Snooks Eaglin. Blind Joe Hill, Blind Willie Johnson. The are all blind. I'm not kidding. There's a million of them." Heard catches her Texas accent peeking through and covers her mouth. "It happens when I get excited," she whispers.

Then she's off, swishing in her white palazzo pants down the aisles, the stack of records under her skinny arm growing as she flips diligently through the racks of '50s country and '60s soul. But it's the blues that really gets her going. "Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters. Ohh, Nina Simone," she says, rhapsodically clutching a record to her chest. "'The Other Woman.' That song will break your heart." Registering what she has said, she pauses abruptly, then heads to the cash register to pay.

Afterward, Heard steps into the sunshine with a bagful of vinyl to add to her collection; she actually travels with a record player, she says. Heard's voice is worldly accented, with each syllable carefully enunciated, and she keeps up an animated patter as we walk down the busy SoHo street, telling me about how vinyl sounds so much better than digital, and how books are better than e-readers. In fact, she has a rare-book collection—"I just love the smell!" she says, throwing her head back so theatrically, it's like she's auditioning for a remake of When Harry Met Sally. A few times, people turn their heads to look at her, but it's unclear if they know her as her or just think she's a pretty girl. No one stops to say, for instance, "I loved you as the hot undead girl in Zombieland," or "You were so good as The Girl in that Mel Gibson/Harrison Ford/Nicolas Cage movie." The only indication that anyone has really recognized her is the paparazzi photos of Heard that come out the next day.

Which is sort of fitting, considering the role actress Amber Heard is best known for is herself. Or some version of herself: The 29-year-old bisexual siren who—allegedly—so bewitched 52-year-old Johnny Depp, her costar in 2011's The Rum Diary, that he eventually broke up his 14-year relationship with Vanessa Paradis, the mother of his two children. This past February, the couple married in a ceremony on his private island, where Depp bestowed upon her gifts including, as one entertainment outlet reported, a pair of his and hers" Shetland ponies.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"That's the first I'm hearing of that," Heard says, disappointingly, of the Shetland ponies. "I mean, who wants those?" she says bemusedly. "I'm sure they are adorable, but...."

They probably take a lot of upkeep, she points out, and truth be told, Heard doesn't really seem like the kind of person who would spend all day brushing them. In the tabloid photos of her on the red carpet, Heard appears a flawless, red-lipped, voluptuous vixen with dewy skin and a haughty stare: the quintessential Other Woman.

Liz Collins

In real life, Heard gives off the vibe of a very, very good-looking cousin of Charlie Brown's friend Linus, digging in her $2,700 purse for her wallet, which she can't find. Her hair is all over the place, and she is wearing, along with the aforementioned palazzo pants, an old T-shirt belonging to her stepson and an old sweater from Zara, which flutters like a sail behind her as she glides down the street. Between living in Los Angeles, shooting a movie in Europe, and traveling to Australia, where Depp is filming the umpteenth Pirates of the Caribbean, Heard barely knows what time zone she's in, she says on the way to the restaurant she has chosen, a Ukrainian place that she endorses with the same full-throated enthusiasm she gives blind bluesmen and rare books. "It's one of those bits of New York that remind me of real New York," she says. "And I love to say, unless I'm near a check-cashing place or a mattress store, I don't feel like I am in a real place."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Inside she scrutinizes the menu ("Why would you put arugula and goat cheese in pierogies?" she wonders aloud. "It seems like a conflict of interest.") before deciding on plain meat pierogies and a black coffee.

If all of this—the blues, the verbiage, the messiness—seems a little bit strenuously real, well, that might be because Amber Heard wants, very badly, to be seen as a real person. She is tired, she tells me, of being put in "a Barbie box" just because she is blond and attractive, of playing The Girl—both in her career and in real life. "I feel like I'm constantly fighting against my exterior," she says, "or this exterior presentation of myself because of how I look or perhaps because of who I am with."

Most Popular

Heard looks anxiously into her coffee, like she's expecting me to break out a tiny violin and can't bear to see it. It was her Aphrodite looks that got her, via modeling, from her Texas hometown to Los Angeles, and her looks did enable her to land a variety of The Girl roles, which established her as enough of a presence in Hollywood to be cast in big projects like The Ruin Diary and the short-lived NBC series The Playboy Club. This is a path she could have stayed on. Instead, Heard is making a dedicated push to show the world she is capable of being more than just The Girl. At the moment, she's in New York for the premiere of two small indies at the Tribeca Film Festival, When I Live My Life Over Again, in which she plays a struggling singer-songwriter, and The Adderall Diaries, costarring James Franco. And this is just the beginning. This month, Heard holds her own (literally!) against Channing Tatum's pectoral muscles as the female lead in the sure-to-be blockbuster Magic Mike XXL. She's just wrapped a starring role in London Fields, an adaptation of the Martin Amis novel, and a supporting part in The Danish Girl, the story of one of the first recipients of sexual re-assignment surgery, played by Eddie Redmayne. "One of the greatest actors of my generation," she says, blowing on her coffee. Heard would like to see herself in that category one day, and to that end, she is working hard, putting in five to seven hours of ballet a day for her role as a dancer in the film.

James Franco, her costar in The Adderall Diaries, barely recognizes her from the squeaky-voiced blond who played Seth Rogen's teenage girlfriend in 2008's Pineapple Express. "She's almost like a different person," he says. "She's taking control of her career and making interesting choices in a much more involved, artistic way." He adds, "She is so beautiful that my guess is that she faces a lot of prejudice."

Even Franco, who knows about Pretty People Problems, sounds a little bit eye-roll-y about Heard's insistence on wear-ing "a huge shaggy brown wig" for her role as the New York Times journalist who befriends Franco's drug-addled writer in the movie. "She's still gorgeous," he points out. But she does make a case that suggests her efforts are not just for her own personal gain. "I'm trying to find scripts that are compelling and complex," she says. "That have the power to, not change—that sounds really grand—but that have the power to impact someone."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Like most women in Hollywood, Heard is depressed by the dearth of layered female roles out there. "I get a stack of scripts, like, once a month, and most of the time, you find these placeholder girls that are there to provide a bounce for the male character," she says. "So we know he's funny because she's serious and she's mad at him. We know he's strong because she needs saving. So really her job is to validate this personality trait of our hero or male. I mean," she says, stabbing into a pierogi, "we're trying to imitate life, and it seems to me a deeply saddening injustice that we are so uncreative and uninterested in developing representations of female life."

The waiter comes by to refill her coffee, and Heard gets momentarily embarrassed about her "pseudo-feminist rant." But the point is made. This is probably not a woman you would give a bow-wrapped Shetland pony to.

Heard folds her long arms on the table and looks me in the eye. "If I get an imaginary Shetland pony," she says, "I'd expect it to have some motherfucking braids on it."

If Heard succeeds in breaking out of the Barbie box, it wouldn't be the first time she has drastically changed her circumstances through sheer force of will. Growing up in a suburb of Austin, Texas, Heard had what her mother called an "adventurer spirit." Her parents have never lived outside of Texas. "They thought they were raising, you know, this, like, sweet Texan Christian girl, who was going to stay with the family just as everyone else does in Texas," Heard says. "But I always wanted to go and do, and I wanted to get out of Texas."

Like all teenagers, Heard didn't feel like she fit in. "I was poor and skinny and weird," she says. Even then, it sounds like her looks sometimes eclipsed the rest of her: "Some kids called her 'Amber seen and not Heard,' " a classmate told Britain's Daily Mail. But she used the pretty to get a modeling agent, which she saw as an exit strategy. Shuttling back and forth on the bus to Austin for small-time gigs like catalogues and dentistry commercials, Heard would pass an art-house movie theater that, one day, she decided to check out. Hours later, she emerged to a blinking set of text messages from her parents. The theater staff "weren't really that diligent about manning this cinema in the matinee hour," she says. "So I would just sneak in. Two dollars to see several movies!"

New Zealand director Niki Caro's film Whale Rider, about a preteen Maori girl fighting sexism in her tribe, changed her life. "It was so foreign and alien to me in Texas," she says. "At the same time, I deeply emotionally related with this character confronted with the aggravations and irritations and social-sexual aspects of her tribe, who was so similar to me as a young person. I left the theater like, you know, just a bit tingly."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Her modeling agent lent her money to take an acting class, and she paid him back by answering the phones and cleaning the office. "So I always would make these small investments to be able to do something that would give me a little bit more currency to travel," she says.

Just before her seventeenth birthday, Heard's best friend died in a car accident. The experience affected Heard deeply. Talking about it now, she chokes up. "As a kid, you think you live forever, you think you're invincible, and that is immediately confronted when you lose someone close to you," she says. Not long after, Heard declared to her Christian parents that she was an atheist, and that she wasn't going to waste any more of her time in Texas. Within a year, she had dropped out of school and moved to New York to model full time. "It did cement in me a growing sensation and awareness that I was going to explore," she says. "I was going to do something other than what everyone else told me I should do. I think it was a reminder that today is what you have. Really."

Liz Collins

As it turned out though, Heard hated modeling. "Hated it," she said. Being a mannequin was not for her. She just wanted to go and do. She stuck with it for a while in order to travel — to Miami, to Europe—but soon she was back in Austin where her commercial agent told her about an audition for a movie, Friday Night Lights, which she booked. Looking back, the part doesn't seem like a terribly auspicious start: Seventeen-year-old Heard mostly rolls around topless in white, fringed cowboy boots. But the part got her a Hollywood agent, who, a year later when Heard moved to Los Angeles, helped her get a tiny part a young Charlize Theron in North Country, a movie about a landmark sexual-harassment case that happened to be directed by Whale Rider's Niki Caro. "It ironic, serendipitous gift," Heard says.

Ironic, perhaps, because she wouldn't see another script like that for a long time. Broke and carless in the biggest driving city on the planet, Heard spent her days riding around on the bus to auditions with a massive bag her friends still tease her about. "It was sad," she says. "It had this pink halter top in it for those roles and a cardigan and a button-up for a differ t kind of role, and I would change in the bathroom."

The pink halter top came out of the bag a lot more often. Heard was cast as a shopgirl in The O.C., as the title character actress in horror flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, as a young actress called Amber in an episode of Calfornication.

"Come see me?" she asks David Duchovny's director character in the episode. "I have some thoughts on the role." "I've got some thoughts, too," says his companion, as they watch her swish away in a low-cut backless top. "Some thoughts that are making it just a little bit crowded in my pants."

It's an exchange that might well have been happening behind Heard's back in real life, too. As she gained her footing in the business, she tried to make the characters she was cast more interesting, "to imbue them with something other," she says.

Most Popular

Looking back, she feels she was pretty naive. "You talk to a director, and you're like, 'What about if we make her weird? What if we make her nuanced? What if she's smart? What if she's funny? Hey, how about I say this; hey, I wrote this line!' And you think you're being taken seriously, because you're speaking to another human being, and you're both attempting to create something, and they're like, `Yeah, yeah, that's cool! We'll make her weird, don't worry; you won't be the whatever.' Then there's a million other eyes, a million other hands get involved, and marketing is like, 'Can you wear this dress?...' " Heard trails off.

The most egregious instance of this, in her eyes, was probably The Playboy Club. The original script promised something Mad Men—esque, a social drama set at the famous Chicago lounge that explored the issues of the day through a group of powerful female characters. "I mean. I read a feminist story," she says. "It was a woman's story. And then it became a male-driven crime show behind our backs; and by the second episode, what we all assumed wouldn't matter—which is the cleavage, because we're all far more nuanced and complex than that, and it's pedantic to assume that the audience only see that—that's all that's being presented to the audience."

Heard shrugs. She doesn't really blame anyone for what happened. "It's not malicious," she says. "The studio has to sell it and get what they think an audience wants to see. By the second episode, you get your script and you're like 'Okay, this is weird,' and by the third episode, you're like, 'I'm seeing a pattern here.' It was a bummer. You can work so hard to bring in all sorts of levels of nuance and personality and depth and complexity and it doesn't matter; if it's not protected by a director, I have to lay down my mallet and say, like, 'Okay.'"

The whole time we have been talking, Heard's marriage to Johnny Depp has barely come up. It's just been sitting there, the proverbial elephant in the room—a big spangled, painted, jewelry-wearing Indian wedding elephant—while I wrestle with my feelings about asking about it. On the one hand: Obviously, a woman should not be defined by who she is married to. I mean, it's 2015! Hillary Clinton is running for president. Wait, that may be a bad example. On the other hand: A small-town Texas girl marrying one of the biggest and wealthiest movie stars in the world is indisputably interesting, even if ponies aren't involved. She's told me a few things, like that he moved out of his Edward Scissorhands—like castle, and they share a place of their own in Los Angeles, and that she has imported her sister Whitney from Texas and a couple of friends, and they all live really nearby—like, on the property—and have dinners together and stuff like that. "Like you have a compound?" I ask, trying to get my head around it. Yeah, like that. Her ring is vintage and cool but not insane. They did get married on an island. "Because he owns an island, right?" Right. I still have so many unanswered questions, like the logistics alone: What did he say the first time he called her? "Hi, this is Johnny Depp." Or did he text? Does Johnny Depp text? Does she call him Johnny Depp? Like, "Johnny Depp and I chose sheets today." Or does she just call him Johnny? No, she says, which just raises more questions.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

I try to play it cool, but I'm pretty sure it comes out: Tell me everything about your bananas life. "We have a fairly normal, um," she says, politely, but also clearly hating this topic. "I guess, we do our best. He has his life, and I have mine, and our challenge is to be able to find time to be together."

But, okay, I press. It must be kind of crazy, if you're a girl who is used to neighborhoods with check-cashing places, to suddenly be living in a compound with a man who—I just have to repeat this again—owns an island. "Nothing is a dramatic change," she says, unconvincingly. "We've been together for a long time now, so it's been a fairly organic process. I have a fiercely independent spirit. I have my own everything."

But—now I'm on a roll—this is a man who, a co-star in one of his movies once told me, is so incandescently famous that if he goes to a restaurant, they pretty much clear the place and sometimes block off the streets outside. "What if you two just go to Starbucks or something?" I wonder.

Heard snorts with laughter. "He would have no interest in that."

Which I actually find to be a very satisfying piece of information.

"The thing that really scares me is the potential of losing my freedom," she says suddenly. "I never want for my life to lose the ability to transverse the world, with freedom and ease." She repeats, with feeling: "The freedom and ease I have worked so hard to acquire for myself,"

She knows any information she gives, even to quell my innocent curiosity, will inevitably be plucked out and processed into a universe of blog posts. "I'm already probably pregnant and divorced," she says. "It's been a month, so clearly there's some trouble. Clearly I'm pregnant, or clearly it's great and we're buying ponies."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

In fact, all of those things are in the atmosphere as she speaks, although the slinky silk slip-dress she'll wear on the red carpet later tonight will put to bed the pregnancy rumors, and her trip to Australia to see Depp the following week will at least briefly quell the rumors that they are "headed for divorce" because Heard has been spending too much time with her ex, female photographer Tasya van Ree. That relationship, which was serious enough that she was calling herself Amber van Ree for a while, was also a matter of public interest, although the tone of the coverage was more similar to frat boys seeing two hot girls kissing in a bar. They are still friends. As for her and Depp, "We're very happy," she says, baring her teeth in a smile. "Very."

Liz Collins

"Ironically, the people with whom I choose to share my life or by whom I'm compelled just so happen to be unwitting proponents, like a distracting force," she continues. "It's hard because I fall in love again and again. I'm in a very similar type of situation and have my career that I've been working hard for now, and yet I still am constantly confronted with these forces that can distract or deflect from where I see my real work."

Okay, so back to her work. Here's the awkward thing: Clearly, Amber Heard is an actor in her own right, and by all accounts, a very good one. At the same time, it's very hard to imagine that being Johnny Depp's wife doesn't give her, as she says, a bigger mallet with which to form her career. It's kind of the Hollywood version of being... well, Bill Clinton's wife. At the very least, she now gets to do the stuff she wants—"tiny tiny indies"— instead of bill-paying, boob-baring stuff.

"I mean, there are pros and cons," says her friend, the photographer and TV host Amanda de Cadenet. "If it's helpful in any way, it's that people will pay more attention to who this woman is. She is a really profoundly smart, intuitive young woman, and I have yet to see her play a role that really shows the depth that exists within her." In the future, de Cadenet expects that will change. "We hung out the other day, and we were talking about, like, art and books and female role models and icons. These are the women who need to get portrayed in films. I can't wait until she starts producing her own films, and we're going to see her sensibility."

Heard and Depp will appear on-screen together for the first time since The Rum Diary in London Fields, a film in which, perhaps not coincidentally, Heard "really takes the stereotype head-on," according to director Mathew Cullen, playing Nicola Six, a literal femme fatale who uses her sexual wiles to manipulate men into plotting her own murder.

"She was very passionate about playing this role, partially because there are so many parallels," says Cullen. "You have somebody that's incredibly beautiful and very smart, but people know her mostly through her sexuality." Occasionally, on set, Heard and Cullen butted heads. The character, as written by Martin Amis, is a succubus stereotype, and Heard wanted her to have more layers. "Amber is a very strong-willed person," Cullen says.

The waiter arrives to take our plates away. Heard takes out a small canister of vitamins. She feels a little something coming on, and she's determined not to get sick. In celebration of completing all of these movies, she's organized a "girls' weekend" in New York with her sister and a bunch of her best friends, who are already in her hotel room, "probably drinking," and awaiting her arrival. After that, she's flying to Australia to celebrate her birthday with Depp. "Through sheer willpower," she says, shaking the vitamins into her hand, "I'm going to overcome this thing."